Hence your so-called saints are the unholiest persons in the world, pretenders, pseudo. Yes, if you look from the outside they look very holy – too much holy, saccharin, too sweet, sickeningly sweet, nauseating. You can only go and pay your respect to them and escape. You can’t live with your saints even for twenty-four hours – they will bore you to death! The closer you are to them, the more puzzled, perplexed, confused you will be, because you will start seeing that from one side they have forced anger: it has entered into another side of their life.

Ordinary people are angry once in a while, and their anger is very fleeting, very momentary. Then again they are laughing, again they are friendly; they don’t carry wounds too long. But your so-called saints, their anger becomes almost a permanent affair; they are simply angry, not at anything in particular. They have repressed anger so much that now they are simply angry, in a state of rage. Their eyes will show, their noses will show, their faces will show, their very way of life will show….

Lu Ting ate at a Greek restaurant because Papadopoulos, the owner, made really good fried rice. Each evening he would come in he would order “flied lice.”

This always caused Papadopoulos to fall down with laughter. Sometimes he would have two or three friends standing nearby just to hear Lu Ting order his “flied lice.”

Eventually the Chinese’s pride was so hurt that he took a special diction lesson just to be able to say “fried rice” correctly.

The next time he went to the restaurant he said very plainly, “Fried rice, please.”

Unable to believe his ears, Papadopoulos asked, “What did you say?”

Lu Ting shouted, “You heard what I said, you fluckin’ Gleek!”

It won’t make much difference – from “flied lice” now it is “fluckin’ Gleek”! You close one door, another immediately opens. This is not the way of transformation.

To change your character is easy; the real work consists in changing your consciousness, in becoming conscious – more conscious, more intensely and passionately conscious. When you are conscious it is impossible to be angry, it is impossible to be greedy, it is impossible to be jealous, it is impossible to be ambitious.

And when all anger, greed, ambition, jealousy, possessiveness, lust, disappear, the energy involved in them is released. That energy becomes your bliss. Now it is not coming from outside; now it is happening inside your being, in your innermost recesses of being.

And when this energy is available you become a receptive field, you become a magnetic field. You attract the beyond – you can call it “God.” Buddha never calls it “God,” he calls it “the beyond”; that is his name for God. When you become a magnetic field, when all the energy that is unnecessarily being wasted by you in your unconsciousness gathers, pools inside you, when you become a lake of energy, you start attracting the stars, you start attracting the beyond, you start attracting God himself.